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The Music in It

Saturday, August 30, 2014

While recently listening to B. B. King, it
occurred to me that blues lyrics are akin to poetry in many ways and have, in
fact, lead to a type of poetry known as “blues poems.” Such poems embrace
subjects that include resilience, strength in the face of hardship, oppression,
and human sorrows.

According to Poets.org,

“One of the most
popular forms of American poetry, the blues poem stems from the African
American oral tradition and the musical tradition of the blues. A blues poem
typically takes on themes such as struggle, despair, and sex. It often (but not
necessarily) follows a form, in which a statement is made in the first line, a
variation is given in the second line, and an ironic alternative is declared in
the third line.”

One of the first poets to think in terms
of blues poems was Langston Hughes, who first heard the blues played by a blind
orchestra in Kansas City; he was eleven years old at the time. When he moved to
the East in 1921, he heard the blues again and later wrote of it in his
autobiography (The Big Sea), “I tried
to write poems like the songs they sang on 7th street.” According to
Hughes, those songs “had the pulse beat of a people who kept on going.”

This week, let’s give blues poems a try.

Guidelines:

1. Listen to a few good blues tunes
(YouTube is a good online source), and get a sense of what typical blues lyrics
are.

2. Blues lyrics are typically twelve bars,
and focus on pain, suffering, subjugation, sadness, or loss. A typical blues
poem stanza contains three lines. For this poem, you may have as many
three-line stanzas as you wish.

3. While blues poems originally
highlighted African-American troubles, the blues sensibility can be applied to
tragedies and wrongs of many kinds.

4. Begin by making a list of blues-worthy
subjects in your own life or in the general world today.

1. Anything “bluesy” carries with it both
lyrical and rhythmical suggestions. Work on incorporating a blues-type rhythm
in your poem. See # 6 above.

2. Considering the Poets.org definition,
begin with a structure that starts with a first-line declarative sentence,
repeat that sentence or give a variation of it in the second line, and use that
sentence to begin a third line that expands on the first two. The intention is
to express an emotion. For example:

I couldn’t believe he/she was gone.

I couldn’t believe he/she was gone.

I couldn’t believe he/she was gone, and I
was left with nothing.

and this from Lead Belly's “Good Morning
Blues”:

Good morning blues. How do you do?

Good morning blues. How do you do?

I’m doing all right. Good morning. How are
you?

3. Don’t be afraid of repetition. Just be
sure to expand in the third line of each stanza.

4. Continue to build your poem using this
structure (understanding that changes may be made when you begin to edit and
tweak). In each new stanza, the problem may become larger and your explanation
more detailed.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Every so often, I like to work
with ekphrasis (using other art forms as inspiration for poems)—we’ve done it
before on the blog, and I thought it might be a nice time of year to relax and
revisit the process of writing ekphrastic poems. So, fix yourself a tall glass
of lemonade, choose an artwork that “speaks” to you, gather your writing
materials and a picture of the artwork, and find a comfortable place indoors or
outdoors where you enjoy writing.

If you’re not familiar with
ekphrastic poetry or need a quick refresher, click here.

Guidelines:

1. Simply choose a work of art (painting, sculpture, musical
composition, photograph, etc.) and write a poem based on it.

2. Be sure to include a reference to the artwork somewhere
in your poem (at the beginning, within the text, or at the end).

Tips:

1. Don’t just describe the artwork you’ve chosen; let the
artwork be your guide and see where it leads you. Relate the artwork to something else (a memory, a person, an experience, a place).

2. Speak directly to the artwork; that is, address the subject (or subjects) of the art.

3. Write from the perspective of the artwork, or adopt the persona of the artwork itself (i.e., write as if you were the Mona Lisa).

4. Write in the voice of the artist who created the artwork.

5. Work with strong images and, if you tell a story, be sure
not to overtell it.

6. Think about including some caesuras (pauses) for
emphasis, and leave some things unsaid—give your readers space to fill in some
blanks.

7. Pose an unanswered question or go for an element of
surprise. Let your poem take an interesting or unexpected turn based on
something triggered by the artwork.

8. Look at the “movement” of the artwork you’ve chosen and
try to represent that movement in your line and stanza breaks. For example, if
a painting “moves” across the canvas, find a way to suggest similar movement in
the way you indent and create line breaks.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Asleep or awake, I suspect that
most poets are dreamers, and our dreams are a rich source of inspiration and
creativity.

Much has been written about
dreams and their interpretation, and dreams have offered an infinite wellspring
of ideas for writers of every stripe throughout written history. This week,
let’s write a poem inspired by an
actual dream (happy dream, emphatic dream, nightmare, surreal dream, waking
dream, precognitive dream)—any dream that you’ve had.

Guidelines:

1. Dig deeply into your dream
recall (your ability to remember dreams) and write down as much of a particular
dream as you can remember (perhaps even a recurrent one).

5. Alternatively, recall times
when you’ve watched a beloved pet sleep, and imagine what that pet’s dreams
might have been. Write a poem about a pet’s dream.

Tips:

1. Focus on imagery and on
creating a sense of your dream’s mood. Mood and tone will be important in this
poem.

2. If the dream didn’t make sense
to you, don’t attempt to force it to make sense in your poem.

3. If the imagery of the dream
was surreal, then use surreal imagery in your poem.

4. You may want to write in the
past tense, but think about switching to the present tense to create a sense of immediacy, as if the dream is
happening now.

5. Be aware of “ing” endings and
overuse of prepositional phrases.

6. If you write about a recurrent
dream, be sure to include some elements of repetition, including anaphora (the
deliberate repetition of the first part of a sentence). Repetition can be used
for emphasis, as well as to create tension, and to enhance the sound quality in
a poem.

7. Let your poem use space on the
page in the same way that it uses space in your mind. If the dream components
are scattered, scatter their word counterparts across the page with interesting
line breaks, indents, and stanzaic arrangements.

The girl who killed herself, her dog, and son speaks to me. She tells me that this death is only sleep. I’m not sure what she means by this—what other death? I stand above her grave, not knowing if there even is a grave (a place to put her—perhaps just ash, the newspapers didn’t say); but, no, I see her face. Her lips move before the words: So much life, she says, is dead before the body follows. She looks at me through stippled eyes and, reaching up, she trims the moon with pinking shears. Light, unraveled, falls (a perfect circle) around the dog beside her—the dog’s spirit scratches its jaw. I don’t know how she came to be inside my dream or why she haunts me—I barely knew her. From my front porch, I see the house in which she lived—the storm door open. Snow that is ice, that is glass, covers the lawn; the lawn splinters and cracks.

1. Think about historical events
that interest you, and make a list of some.

2. Choose one historical event
from your list and think about that event in terms of what no one can ever
know.

A. What were
the people central to the event really thinking.
For example, what do you think Mary Queen of Scots was thinking just before her
head was severed. What were the builders of Stonehenge thinking as they
transported and lifted those huge stones into place?

B. Consider what
happened moments before the event to one of the people central to it?

C. Tell how did the event happen to be recorded incorrectly.

D. What did people misunderstand at the time the event occurred?

E. What if
there had been computers and cell phones, email and texting, when the event
occurred? How might things have happened differently?

3.Free write for a while
just to get some ideas into written words.

4. Take a look at what you’ve written and work the best of it
into a poem in which you give a different interpretation, description, or
understanding of a single historical event.

5. Consider assuming the persona
of a historical figure and write from that person’s “invented” perspective.

Tips:

1. Funny, flippant, and just plain
silly are okay for this poem, but don’t get so caught up in the fun that you
sacrifice quality.

2. After you’ve got a fairly good
draft completed, look at what you’ve got and work on arranging the poem into
lines and stanzas. Don’t become bound by a particular format. Let your poem
“speak” to you, and because you’re “fracturing” history, let your lines and
stanzas be “fractured” (uneven, broken, emjambed) as well.

3. Here are some historical
events you might consider: the death of Cleopatra, the signing of the Magna
Carta, DaVinci painting the “Mona Lisa,” Shakespeare writing one of the plays
or sonnets, Columbus landing in the “New World,” Marie Antoinette on her way to
the guillotine, the Wright Brothers flying the first motorized plane, Fleming
discovering penicillin, the first moon walk.

4. For some added fun, include at
least one anachronism (something that belongs to a period in which it didn’t
yet exist; for example, a plane flying over Alexandria as Cleopatra lifts the
asp to her neck or Columbus checking his watch at the precise moment of landing).

5. An alternative idea might be
to rewrite a famous poem about a historical event (i.e., “Paul Revere’s Ride”
by Longfellow).

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Following Ken Ronkowitz's guest blog on “ronka” (July 12, 2014), I'm happy to introduce you to Penny Harter, a distinguished poet whose work in haiku-related forms is internationally known. Penny has been widely published in journals and anthologies throughout the U.S. and abroad, and she has been awarded three poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as awards from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the first William O. Douglas Nature Writing Award, and a fellowship from VCCA for a residency in 2011. She visits schools for the New Jersey Writers Project of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. This week, Penny leads us through a detailed understanding of the Japanese poetry form called haibun. I hope you'll enjoy writing some haibun of your own, and I hope you'll visit Penny online: Penny's Website, Penny's Blog, Penny's Books at Amazon.com.

From Penny:

Although I write free-verse poems, prose poems, short stories and mini-stories, reviews, essays and educational articles, in recent months I have increasingly fallen under the spell of haibun. Haibun, with its mix of prose and poetry fascinates me. Originally conceived by Basho in his Narrow Road to the Deep North as a travel journal—and still sometimes written as one—haibun in the west can also capture an interior, spiritual and /or emotional journey.

The Haiku Society of America defines haibun as follows: “A haibun is a terse, relatively short prose poem in the haikai [all haiku-related literature] style, usually including both lightly humorous and more serious elements. A haibun usually ends with a haiku.

“Notes: Most haibun range from well under 100 words to 200 or 300. Some longer haibun may contain a few haiku interspersed between sections of prose. In haibun the connections between the prose and any included haiku may not be immediately obvious, or the haiku may deepen the tone, or take the work in a new direction, recasting the meaning of the foregoing prose, much as a stanza in a linked-verse poem revises the meaning of the previous verse . . . .” (HSA Definitions).

In our book, The Haiku Handbook, my late husband, William J. (Bill) Higginson, reflects on haibun written in the West: “Like haiku, haibun begins in the everyday events of the author’s life. These events occur as minute particulars of object, person, place, action. The author recognizes that these events connect with others in the fabric of time and literature, and weaves a pattern demonstrating this connection. And if this writing is to be truly haibun, the author does this with a striking economy of language, without any unnecessary grammar, so that each word carries rich layers of meaning.” (221) Bill goes on to say: Bringing the spareness of haiku poetry to prose gives us the best of autobiography and familiar essay—the actions, events, people, places, and recollections of life lived—without weighing them down with sentimentality, perhaps the greatest enemy of art and life.” (221)

What haiku contribute to haibun prose feels akin to the process of linking in the communal poetry called renku. I've always enjoyed writing renku—a process that requires one to come up with verses that turn a corner—”move away”—with respect to each preceding verse, but still connect in mood, tone, image, or theme. In renku-writing, this is often referred to as “link and shift.” If the haiku in a haibun work well, they both anchor the piece and let it go. Or, they simultaneously frame it and break the frame.

I deliberately decided to experiment with writing haibun in three ways: writing original haibun, shifting longer narrative poems into haibun, and turning prose poems into haibun. Hopefully, sharing my process with you will encourage you to experiment in similar ways.

I. Writing Original Haibun

I wrote the following two poems as haibun. My husband, died in October of 2008. While writing my way through grief into healing, I often found myself using haibun. Here’s a piece from December of 2008, only a few months after Bill’s death. It’s now published in Recycling Starlight, my chapbook of poems processing grief. I was seeking light and had heard that there was going to be a huge moon that December:

Moon-Seeking Soup

Last night when the December moon was closer to the Earth than it had been in years, huge on the horizon, blazing hills and craters, I saw it too late, too high in the sky. Still, I could almost count the peaks that held the sun.

Tonight, after slicing red potatoes, yams, carrots, onions, and garlic into a base of chicken broth; after shaking a delicate rain of basil and tarragon onto the surface and stirring those sweet spices in—while the soup simmered, I threw on a jacket over my nightclothes and ran out to look for the moon. My slippered feet were cold as I searched the sky, wanting to raise my face into white light.

But there was no moon, no glow over the apartment roofs to say it was rising, so I came back in and stirred my soup, raising the ladle to my lips to taste again and again the dark fruits of the Earth.

moon-seeking soup—

my own face reflected

in the broth

I wanted to see that light after two months of deep mourning, wanted to be lifted up and out of myself into that sky. But I was also deeply involved with the “fruits of the Earth” as I stirred my soup—and that’s why I listed all its ingredients. The final haiku came as I bent over the cauldron of soup—although I didn’t actually see my face. Instead, I realized that I was still bound to the Earth, and that rather than escape into the sky, I needed to stay in the place I was, grieving and healing. This haiku is more closely related to the main narrative than those in many haibun, though it does jump to “my own face.”

Interestingly, a year later, having moved and begun a new life, I found myself again writing a December haibun, this time reflecting the kindness of a neighbor who brought me light:

Winter Stars

My neighbor fills her winter garden with oaktag cut-outs of red and yellow stars—hangs them from her bird feeder or glues them atop the planting sticks she's left in the dirt between withered blooms. Yesterday, she knocked on my door, and I opened it to find her hands overflowing with stars—each hole-punched and threaded with yarn—a new constellation for these days of early dark.

“These are for you to hang places,” she said simply, knowing of my need for joy this Christmas season. As we smiled and hugged one another, I received them in my cupped hands. Now stars dangle from my doorknobs and brighten shadowed corners—an unexpected gift of light.

moon splinters

on the river—the glint

of ice floes

Here, the haiku is also both literal and metaphorical, and it does shift farther from the narrative than the haiku in the preceding example. I live near a river, and there had been ice floes floating in it. The river’s current that winter seemed akin to my process of healing—my encountering more and more glints of light—as in my neighbor’s kindness. The haiku does not focus on her and the gift she brought, yet it connects in mood and theme.

II. Shifting a Narrative Poem Into a Haibun

When one takes a narrative poem and transforms it into a haibun, something quite different happens to the original poem. A good poem may already reverberate in several directions, ripple with associations. But recasting that poem into poetic prose and adding haiku opens it up even further—precisely because the haiku shift the focus enough that it becomes a different work. They expand upon the original perception. In the following two examples, you can see how my original narrative poems changed when I translated them into haibun. The following poem felt unfinished, lacking enough “punch” to capture the experience”

Estell Manor State Park

That gray day, wind soughed in the pines,

and oaks arced full over trails that faded

into green or snaked into a density

of swamp and lichened trunks.

We walked a narrow road around

the wooded heart, wondering which trail

would claim us first until the wind

caught a dead limb and tossed it

down before us—the loud crack

fusing with its swift descent.

We said the usual things: what if

we’d been a few yards further along,

or a car had been there—then cautiously

pressed on, although we stopped

to drag the heavy branch aside

before we left the loop road for a trail

that led us deeper in.

The haibun version, for me, has more power because of the haiku framing it: Estell Manor State Park

turkey buzzard—

red beak into its own

black wing

That gray day, wind soughed in the pines, and oaks arced full over trails that faded into green or snaked into a density of swamp and lichened trunks.

We walked a narrow road around the wooded heart, wondering which trail would claim us first until the wind caught a dead limb and tossed that full weight down before us—the loud crack fused with its swift descent.

We said the usual things: what if we’d been a few yards further along . . . or if a car . . . then cautiously pressed on, although we stopped to drag the heavy branch aside before we left the loop road for a trail.

night thoughts—

my heartbeat quickens

in this dark

In first draft, this haibun included only the last haiku. However, a friend suggested it needed something more at the beginning. I added the opening haiku because I did see that turkey buzzard in the park, and the irony of the fact that it usually sinks its red beak into carrion struck me at the time. Thinking about how close my friend and I had come to being seriously injured, or even killed, it seemed a fitting intro to the mood and content of the haibun. The closing haiku, though amplifying the earlier fear, can also be a universal experience. We all know about those thoughts that can visit us in the pre-dawn hours.

III. Turning a Prose-poem into a Haibun

The same reverberating circles of meaning can happen when haiku are added to open up a prose-poem. Since I felt the original needed more punch, I shifted the following prose-poem into a haibun. In the process, I even changed the title:

No Other Place

Two hawks circle far above, afternoon sunlight gilding their wings as their shadows swiftly cross the road before me. In red canyons of the West, ravens ride the thermals, their harsh calls dark as the storm clouds that shadow the ridges.

There is no other place but here where the gas burner spurts blue, steam hisses from the kettle, and a clock on the wall keeps time above a granite counter-top chilled by mountain winds.

Here where hawks prey on the living, ravens descend on the dead. Between my palm a cup of black tea deepens.

And now, the haibun version:

Keeping Time

Two hawks circle far above, afternoon sunlight gilding their wings as their shadows swiftly cross the road before me.

In red canyons of the West, ravens ride the thermals, their harsh calls dark as the storm clouds that shadow the ridges.

again that dream

of refuge in a cave

above the river

There is no other place but here where the gas burner spurts blue, steam hisses from the kettle, and a clock on the wall keeps time above a granite counter-top chilled by mountain winds.

Hawks prey on the living, ravens descend on the dead. Between my palm a cup of black tea deepens.

squatting beneath

the hammock, a child

digs a hole to China

The title change happened because I felt the entire piece was, as is much of my work, about the mystery of time passing vs. the eternal present—perhaps feeling both are one. The first haibun emerged from memories of caves seen in the walls of several red-rock canyons of the West, and the desire for safety from any kind of storm. And the second haiku, from a childhood memory of me doing just that—as well as an association between the tea “deepening” and the deepening hole I, the child, believed I could dig in the dirt.

For me, the basis of all poetry writing begins in synthesis—like Indra’s web. One can pluck the web of one’s experience at any node, and the whole thing vibrates. A good poem connects the thing perceived with the perceiver, as does a good haiku. Basho is reputed to have said, “To write of the pine, go to the pine.” But in a good haibun, we go to the pine—and then through the haiku we follow the pine’s roots, or needles and cones as they fall—spiraling farther and farther afield while still orbiting the pine—still linked to the original image.

I encourage you to try writing haibun in any of the ways I’ve shared. You may also fall under haibun’s spell. It can be an exciting and rewarding process.

IV. Tips for Writing Haibun

1. A haibun is not a short story. A haibun relates a journey, whether the travel is a physical exploration of the world or an internal journey of spiritual and/or emotional discovery. It should take the reader somewhere—from here to there.

2. Both the prose and haiku should be image-centered. Trim the language in the prose section to its essence. The prose portion can be written in sentence fragments or complete sentences.

3. The haibun prose should be more akin to a prose-poem. And rather than in paragraph format, the prose is usually presented in blocks. Some contemporary haibun are even in verse form with haiku indented before and between stanzas, or at the poem’s end.

4. There is no set length to a haibun. It can be one paragraph with one haiku, or several pages with haiku interspersed throughout.

5. Many haibun are simply narratives of special moments in a person’s life. Like haiku, haibun often begin in everyday events—minute particulars of object, person, place, and/or action. Haibun are usually autobiographical and personal, and most often written in present tense.

6. However, some haibun published in contemporary journals also recount actual travels, memories, dreams, and fantasies.

7. The haibun’s haiku do connect to the prose, but in the best haibun, the haiku do not directly continue the narrative. Instead, they relate in theme, mood, or tone. Inserting the haiku into the haibun is like throwing a stone into a pond—causing ripples of association.

8. If you google “journals that publish haibun” you will find plenty of examples on-line.

Thanks to Wiggerman, Scott and David Meischen for permission to quote portions of my essay “Circling the Pine: Haibun and the Spiral Web” from Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry. Austin Texas, Dos Gatos Press, 2011.

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THE MUSIC IN IT

"The Music In It" is a blog for anyone interested in poets and poetry—the craft and the community.

The title comes from Countee Cullen, who wrote: "My poetry, I should think, has become the way of my giving out whatever music is in me."

Look for a new prompt or guest blogger every week or every other week, usually posted on Saturdays, and check the archives for older prompts and posts. Be sure to click on the poetry-related links in the sidebar.

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ABOUT NOT ASKING WHAT IF

"Kenny has written some of the most hauntingly beautiful spiritual haiku I’ve ever read—haiku that take us as close to divinity as human language can get. Her haiku are spare and commanding, rich in imagery, and layered with meaning." (Alex Pinto, Tiferet)

“Traditional haiku, environmental haiku, psychological haiku, spiritual haiku—Adele Kenny has done them all. Her haiku are spare and powerful, always nuanced with rich symbolism. Her images and juxtapositions make readers hold their breath in wonder.” (Malachy McCourt, Author of A Monk Swimming)

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ABOUT WHAT MATTERS

"In Adele Kenny's finely wrought meditations on grief and loss, she never forgets that she's a maker of poems. What Matters straddles two of the exigencies of the human condition: diminishment and endurance. It abounds with poems that skillfully earn their sentiments." (Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry)

"These are poems that come to (poetic) grips with the issues of grief, fear, and death ... focused in a new and strong way." (Gerald Stern, National Book Award in Poetry)

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I’m the author of 24 books (poetry & nonfiction) with poems published in journals worldwide, as well as in books and anthologies from Crown, Tuttle, Shambhala, and McGraw-Hill.
I’ve worked as a guest poet for numerous agencies, have twice been a featured reader in the Dodge Poetry Festival, and my awards include two poetry fellowships from the NJ State Arts Council, the 2012 International Book Award for Poetry, and the Distinguished Alumni Award (Kean University). My book, A LIGHTNESS, A THIRST, OR NOTHING AT ALL, is a 2016 Paterson Prize finalist. In March of 2012, I was appointed Poet Laureate of Fanwood, NJ by the Borough Mayor and Council.
A former professor of creative writing in the College of New Rochelle’s Graduate School, I’m founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series and poetry editor for Tiferet Journal. I give readings and conduct both agency-sponsored and private poetry workshops.

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ATTENTION HAIKU POETS

If your area of interest is haiku and its related forms, click the image above for a list of journals (published in various countries) that might interest you.

ON THE TIP OF YOUR TONGUE

Ever find yourself in the middle of a poem and unable to find that one perfect word? Here's the link for a site that provides synonyms, antonyms, related words, similar sounding words, and much more. Easy to use!